Hello and welcome to The Marketing Blog. My name is Michael Fleischner and this blog has been developed to share my more than 14 years of Marketing experience with anyone interested in learning more about marketing or Internet marketing. The Marketing Blog markets marketing simple and covers all aspects of marketing with a particular focus on internet marketing.

Thursday, August 02, 2018

This post will tell you EXACTLY how to get
the most from influencers on Social Media and get right into the heart of the
industry, which you operate.

And the best part, it works for ANY
industry.

I’ll tell you how to create an article,
also known as a web asset, which allows you to promote to influencers in your
niche.

Then I show you how to get their attention,
by promoting on the increasingly over-crowded, social media platforms.

I also give you a few tips on how to make
sure your article provides a great user experience.

So let’s get going…

Creating a web asset (a unique article in the form of a list)

Step 1: Plan an article on your blog

The first thing you need, to start
generating traffic to your website, is a blog post that provides information to
help your target market with challenges they face.

For this strategy, your article is going to
be a ‘listicle’. That’s simply an article in the form of a list.

You will want to include a minimum of 40
items in your listicle. So, do some keyword research and pick a subject that’s
wide enough.

Here’s a few examples:

·42 Must Have Business Analysis
Books

·43 Outstanding Quotes from
Business Experts

·45 Amazing Recipes from the
best cake bloggers

So, you could simply create a list of books
that relate to your industry and include the authors.

Alternatively, you could find recipes that
have already been tried and tested by bloggers with influence. And reference
their recipe page.

After creating a shortlist of keywords, find
the influencers you want to mention in your post and make a note of each one.

When you have decided on a minimum of 40
influencers and their content you want to reference, you want to do a bit more
digging.

Find their contact details:

- --Twitter Profile (Personal and
business)

- -- Facebook Website Page

- --LinkedIn Profile

- -- Instagram

- -- Email address (if available)

You might not get all these details but try
to get the details of at least 2 social platforms.

Then, you’re ready for step 2.

Step 2: Create the article that lists your industry
influencers

This should be easy, but I have a few tips
to get you going.

Firstly, it’s hugely important to create a fantastic
user experience to keep visitors on your site after landing from the search
engines or from social channels.

And there’s a couple of things you can do
to achieve this.

1. Design a visual, easy-to-follow
table for the page in a logical order so that people can look down the table at
their own leisure and find what they might be looking for.

2 2. Add sort buttons to the top of
the table so that your readers can view the list in any order they want.

3. Also, make sure you write a brief
introduction above the table, so you have some content on the page. That way,
you’ll be more likely to rank in the search engines.

4. Finally, you could even add in a hook,
which leads the visitor to another one of your articles. That will reduce your
bounce rate.

The most important part of the listicle is
that you have the names of influencers who are on social media, this can be
either Twitter, Facebook or even LinkedIn. Just make sure that they have a nice
number of followers.

Here’s an example of what your table might
look like:

You can see the full table and article here
if you want to take a look.

Step 3: Optimize the article for SEO (search engine traffic)

Google is now showing rich snippets, as
the top result, more and more often. And lists are no exception.

So, one of the other benefits of listing
items in an article is that they often show up in the rich snippets.

Here’s
an example:

When you search for best coffee beans in
Google, there’s a list of different options that have come from a blog.

However, there’s few things you need to
do in the code so that the page is optimized.

Such as using <li> and
<o> or <ul> or <table> tags. Teaching html is outside the scope of this
post, so if you’re unsure, find someone who knows.

Now you’ve created your list and identified important influencers, it’s
time for the most important part of blogging - start promoting your new
article.

Here’s how…

Promoting your new asset – one tweet every day

This step is essential if you want to grow
your website. Many digital marketing specialists say:

“Content is KING!”

I
say….

Content is good but promotion is the true KING.
So, here’s how you can massively leverage the visibility of your new post.

Step 4: Schedule one tweet per day

You probably know this but whenever you
mention someone in your tweet or share, that person receives an immediate
notification saying you just mentioned them.

This is gold dust for marketers. It’s
practically free advertising.

Here’s the strategy you need to implement.

Remember the list of influencers you
created at the start. It’s now time to use it.

I’ll explain using Twitter but you can
recreate this strategy using any of the social platforms.

Write a tweet that mentions and thanks every
one of the influencers that you mentioned in your post. Tell them they’ve been
added to the list. And thank them for their contribution, include their
personal twitter handle.

Here’s a preview of one I created for 42
influencers in the Business Analysis niche. Notice that I provide both a link
back to the article and a direct mention of the author of each of the books.

The reason you do this is because the
author will be notified and may retweet your tweet to their thousands of
followers. That will give you loads more recognition AND traffic to your blog –
BOOM!

Step 5: Email the influencers

Doing this can get you involved with the
influencers just that little bit more, but you may find it difficult to get
hold of their email addresses. However, if you do find contact details, don’t
be afraid to drop them an email.

All you need to do is write out an email to
the influencers and request a collaboration.

Here’s an example email.

Hey
[Influencer Name]

I
hope you don’t mind but I’ve added your book to my list of Must have Business
Analysis Books.

It’s here:
[LINK TO YOUR WEBSITE]

I
wondered if you’d be interested in mentioning my list on your website.

I’d
be happy to write some lead in text for you if you’re interested.

I
would love to hear from you.

Cheers,

Matt

So, there you have it, a few steps that
will take you immediately towards getting recognised in your industry after
setting up a business or blog.

And I guess, the morale of the story is,
that you need to promote other people before they will promote you and your
business.

OnlineGrowth Guru SEO is a digital company in
Manchester, UK. They specialize is growing clients websites using different
promotion strategies.